Hardware support for manageability is an important consideration in the operation of datacenters. Quality of manageability support has direct impact on administration costs of datacenters, which are a significant portion of a total cost for ownership (TCO) for an entire computing infrastructure. As management tasks become more complex, hardware provided by current management architectures is limited because of cost constraints. Currently, processor vendors are increasing use of multicore architectures that use multicore processors.
The multicore processors contain two or more independent processors. The independent processors or cores are known to roughly follow Moore's law, which requires that computing resources on a single socket grow exponentially with technology generations, pressing software to provide comparable increases in functionalities and parallelism. Unfortunately, conventional architectures having many cores are known to be unable to sustain peak performance. This happens because of a dynamism of applications (for instance, cloud computing) which makes usage of resources uneven over time. Additionally, the memory bandwidth and capacity constraints severely limit workload consolidation.
Most current solutions for low-level manageability are based on a management processor. The management processor is typically implemented as a small microcontroller or as a custom application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) solution. The management processor is known to permit access to a server independently of the status of a main processor, that is, even if the power is off or the server has crashed. This type of communication is said to use an “out-of-band” channel and allows for “lights-out” or “out-of-band” management. The management processor also interfaces with sensors, such as on-board temperature monitors, central processing unit (CPU) status sensors, and fans, and provides basic and advanced management functionalities, including inventory, power policy setting, power on/off, booting, and diagnostic operations.
Because the management processor is deployed in a de facto separate computer, it is straightforward to implement an independent out-of-band channel with sufficient reliability. However, this approach is known to constrain the complexity of the management tasks that are executable on the management system.